The Phaser Has Officially Been Invented. Sadly No Redshirts Were Killed.

You could probably get a graduate thesis out of this image. Also, phasers are real now. Sorta.

It turns out that the phaser is actually a sound-based device. Who knew? Also it’s really tiny.

OK, we’re fudging a little bit, here. The phaser in question is not a handheld directed-energy weapon, at least not yet. Instead, it’s a device that focuses phonons, which are essentially photons, only with sound instead of light.

The key point here is that, like a laser, it focuses on a very, very narrow spectrum:

For the phaser, a mechanical oscillator jiggles and excites a bunch of phonons, which relax and release their energy back into the device. The confined energy causes the phaser to vibrate at its fundamental frequency but with at a very narrow wavelength. The sound laser produces phonons at 170 kilohertz, far above human hearing range, which peters out around 20 kilohertz. The entire device is etched onto an integrated circuit that’s about 1 cm by 0.5 cm.

OK, so aside from being kinda neat, why should you care?

Well, the short answer is that phasers could, in their current form, make measurement much more precise. This too sounds boring until you realize it could mean, for example, the machining of much smaller and thinner parts to tighter tolerances, opening new horizons in pretty much every product you buy. It can also serve as a clock, meaning quartz crystals can be removed from electronics, reducing those in size even further.

And these are just the ideas the team who invented it have come up with. Everybody thought the laser was this dorky curiosity nearly a half-century ago, and today it’s crucial to modern life. Who knows where the phaser might take us?

Here’s the problem with directed energy weapons: Generally, to maintain any strength, it needs to be a consistent beam. That’s INCREDIBLY energy intensive: Systems like MTHEL are ridiculous in their power needs. There’s also the problem of which kind of laser to use.

We are getting closer to artillery-type weapons reaching production: DARPA’s HELLADS system is also getting close to production and seems to have genuine military value. The Boeing YAL-1 had promise, but the Air Force gave up on it, although I suspect that tech will turn up in other military laser weapons.

But shrinking that down to handheld size is going to take MASSIVE advances in battery technology, which to be fair are happening at a surprisingly rapid pace. But with current technology it’d be more like a flame-thrower type device than a hand-held pistol, and it’d weigh hundreds of pounds.

Ironically the phaser here is way more likely to be a hand-held directed energy weapon in our lifetimes; It consumes less power and it can probably be scaled up. It wouldn’t really have a visible beam, though, so it’s still not an SF weapon.

You’re giving me a bunch of excuses. I want to work with you – we go way back – but I need to be able to burn somebody into vapors with my iPhone, and I got a black guy with Bootsy Collins glasses and an Irishman sitting outside who say they can get it done.

Seriously, I don’t think energy based small arms will ever happen. It’s too easy and too cheap to throw dense stuff like lead really hard.